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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Gilroy say DuBois arrived at his identity?
(a) Accidentally.
(b) Straight from his roots.
(c) By choice.
(d) By many routes.

2. What does music represent, according to Gilroy?
(a) Pre-discursive elements in black experience.
(b) The conflict between literacy and experience.
(c) The essence of black culture.
(d) The ongoing struggle against modernity.

3. What do Jews and blacks fear from a discussion of the Holocaust and slavery?
(a) Loss of uniqueness.
(b) Remembering.
(c) Confronting all the things that cannot be known.
(d) The lack of evidence from their familial histories.

4. What does tradition signify in black culture according to Gilroy?
(a) A history of reclaiming the self from slavery.
(b) A chance to invent tradition going forward.
(c) A dynamic development of black culture.
(d) A world of opportunities in industrialism capitalism.

5. Why should blacks openly recognize the debt of their cultural language?
(a) To make peaceful relations with Jews.
(b) To build bridges to white culture.
(c) To accept their place in Western civilization.
(d) To recognize that their culture is part of a larger cultural development.

6. Where did Richard Wright develop his ideas about race?
(a) In his world travels.
(b) In the American south.
(c) Chicago.
(d) London.

7. What does Gilroy say DuBois often reminded blacks?
(a) That slavery was worse than cultural collapse.
(b) That slavery was a finite stage in the development of the world consciousness.
(c) That slavery was the worst thing people could suffer.
(d) That slavery was not the worst form of domination.

8. What was private violence connected to in Richard Wright's account?
(a) Public violence.
(b) Slavery.
(c) Capitalism.
(d) Human nature.

9. What ideology was Richard Wright ambivalent to according to Gilroy?
(a) The ideology of family.
(b) The ideology of personal emancipation.
(c) The ideology of self-reliance.
(d) The ideology of racial progress.

10. What does Gilroy say modernism relies on?
(a) A sense of progress, and a continuity with the past.
(b) A sense of time and a break with the past.
(c) A sense of transformation, and an evolution from the past.
(d) A sense of justice, and a development of political institutions.

11. What does Gilroy say gave Richard Wright his authenticity?
(a) His birth in Chicago.
(b) His political activities.
(c) His travels to Africa.
(d) His origins in Mississippi.

12. The second mode of double consciousness portrays blacks as what?
(a) A prophecy of a homeland.
(b) Wandering for a time.
(c) A home unto himself.
(d) Homeless.

13. How does Gilroy describe slavery?
(a) Brutal.
(b) Equivocal.
(c) Multi-faceted.
(d) Complex.

14. How did DuBois' birthplace affect his identity?
(a) He felt genuinely black because he was born in Africa.
(b) He felt like a spokesman for his race because he was born among them in the south.
(c) He felt inauthentically black because he was not born in the south.
(d) He felt aloof from American race politics because he was born in England.

15. What did DuBois believe in that Richard Wright did not believe in according to Gilroy?
(a) Essential blackness.
(b) Returning to black roots.
(c) Pan-Africanism.
(d) Social perfection.

Short Answer Questions

1. What conflict was taking up too much space in the discussion of race in American literature according to Richard Wright?

2. Why has the analysis of Wright's work been impoverished according to Gilroy?

3. Which adjective does DuBois NOT use for the black experience?

4. Cornel West used DuBois' work as a solution to a crisis in what?

5. What ontological state does Gilroy say is the heart of many stories in black culture?

(see the answer keys)

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